Tactile Refuge – Malin Tadaa

Escape to an alternative reality, a tactile world shaped by your touch.

Tactile Refuge is an interactive, light emitting, textile installation in which the viewer is the creator of their environment. The piece consists of six fabric wings, woven with optical fibers that are lit from within, and a hanging centrepiece, hand-tufted and implanted with optical fibers and LEDs. The installation is seemingly floating in a sheltered, dark space.

The centerpiece sculpture is registering human touch and reacts by changing colour. It affects the entire installation and intensifies the immersive light patterns in the fabric of the wings. Collaborating together will make the reaction even stronger, changing the atmosphere of the entire space.

Malin Bobeck has been working with the vision of creating interactive textile fabrics for many years, first using optical fibres in her materials in 2013.

– I’m trying to create spaces where you can share experiences with strangers in an open and vulnerable way. I do so by twisting the perspectives, and creating fantasy worlds using interactive textile materials and animated light. Hopefully you will come out of it smiling, taking the experience with you and letting you see the regular world in a new glow.

Malin’s innovatively responsive materials propels our desire for shared experience gathered in immersive spatial installations. The work brings together groups of strangers to briefly escape the outside world. By touching the centrepiece of the installation, participants will set off varying light patterns which ripple around them, coursing through the mounted wings.

‘Tactile Refuge’, provides just that. Drawing initially on inspiration from the curious worlds under the Earth’s waters, it is a space in which participants can submerge themselves in a calm and curious tranquility, under the glow of glimmering LED lights.

Malin Bobeck is a textile designer and artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Her works revolve around light emitting textiles, specializing in optical fibers. Her design process ranges from fiber to installation, including textile construction, design, weaving and implementation. She collaborates with interior designers to create intelligent environments and tailored interiors. Her art has been exhibited in National Museum of Art in Stockholm and National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute, Taipei, among others. She has also been awarded several scholarships, most recently the Stockholm Innovation Scholarship in December 2016.

Custom designed optical fiber fabric, woven on a Dornier Jacquard loom at Bogesunds weavery in Sweden.

12 000 m of optical fibers combined with Pemotex – Trevira CS, chenille, polyester and lurex yarn

6 wings measuring approximately 150 x 100 x 50 cm

Handtufted centerpiece in wool

480 addressable colour LEDs

Teensy microcontroller

With support from

Emma Clayton

Gustaf Josefsson

Bogesund Weavery

Jesper Nielsen at Trevira

Tactile Refuge is exhibited in Colour Emotions – Broken Illutions at Hallwyl Museum February 9 – 19 2017

and Heimtextil, Frankfurt , Germany, January 10-13 2017.

Optical Fiber Textile